Communication between physicians and their patients can affect patients' satisfaction with medical care, compliance with medical regimens, and outcome-of-treatment. Success of the physician-patient relationship probably owes much to the personality and behavior of the physician, but research attempting to specify traditional personality predictors of interpersonal success with patients has produced weak and equivocal findings. Furthermore, criterion variables of success have been unreliable and inaccurate, usually consisting of supervisor, peer and self-ratings of the physician's success with patients rather than ratings by the patients themselves. The proposed social psychological study seeks to examine physician empathy as a predictor of patient satisfaction with medical care and compliance with medical regimens. Empathy is specified as the ability to communicate and understand nonverbal cues. Forty-eight resident physicians in Family Practice will be assessed on their affective sensitivity (with the PONS test) and their ability to communicate affective messages nonverbally. Fifteen of each physician's clinic patients will be interviewed about their satisfaction with the physician's interpersonal treatment of them. Each physician's understanding of patients' concerns, cost efficiency, and patient compliance (appointment-keeping) will be measured. Research questions: (1) Do physicians who are more accurate decoders and/or encoders of nonverbal cues satisfy their patients more effectively, elicit greater compliance, and understand patients' concerns better than those who are deficient in affective sensitivity and/or expressive control? (2) Can a physician satisfy patient's interpersonal needs and maintain high compliance while keeping down the length and cost of his or her interactions with patients? This research will attempt to specify components of interpersonal skills in which helping professionals might successfully be trained, in order to improve their rapport with clients or patients. This study will also test the generality of the "empathy models". If the relationship between empathy and satisfaction/compliance holds in other helping relationships such as the physician-patient relationship, the proposed salutary effects of therapist sensitivity might best be considered part of a basic psychological process of interpersonal healing.